Video information is ubiquitous in today's world. Children learn from television shows and educational lesions prepared for video. Adults use video for entertainment and to keep informed with current events. Digital versatile disks (DVDs), digital cable, and satellite television use digital video data, in contrast to the older analog mechanisms for recording and distributing video information. Digital video data is becoming more and more prevalent in today's home and office environment.
The amount of numeric computation involved in processing digital video data requires an enormous amount of computational power. Generating digital video data of typical quality for one second's worth of video requires performing between tens of millions and a billion arithmetic computations.
Hardware can be used to speed up video computations, compared with software encoders, decoders, and transcoders for digital video data. However, typical approaches to hardware design operate only with video data in one particular format at one particular resolution. Thus there is a need for hardware that works with video data of different resolutions, standards, formats, etc.